How to Read a Poem: Autodidact, Episode 2
In this episode of the Autodidact, Dr. Fleming takes on the often-requested question of how to read a poem. He examines a few lines from John Milton’s Paradise Lost through better-known lenses like rhyme and meter, but also lesser-known ones like anaclasis, elision, and assonance.
Episode 1: Mystery and Detective Stories
Original Air Date: October 4, 2018
Show Run Time: 1 hour 3 minutes
Show Guest(s): Dr. Thomas Fleming
Show Host(s): Stephen Heiner
Autodidact℗ is a Production of the Fleming Foundation. Copyright 2018. All Rights are Reserved.
This is very edifying, and deserves repeated listening.
I concur with Mr Wilson, and hope you’ll do more podcasts on the subject, perhaps featuring poetry from the 19th and 20th Centuries. I’d really like to hear a podcast on Pound and Eliot, even one on each (though I know you’re not crazy about Pound’s verse in general). A comparison of Eliot’s Waste Land versus his Ash Wednesday periods, would be fascinating to me, as I’ve heard you comment on both poems, in the past.
I should also mention that this podcast has inspired me to pick up Milton for the first time in my life. I swallowed the cant of feckless English professors, who were rather dismissive of Paradise Lost. I suppose it was easier for them to dismiss it than to actually engage with it to the degree Dr Fleming apparently has.